BenQ Creative Pro PD2732U monitor review

Serious photo or video editing demands a monitor that can produce image quality you can trust. That means high color accuracy, excellent color and brightness uniformity across the screen, and the ability to display the highest possible percentage of the color gamut you work in. Judged on these metrics, the BenQ Creative Pro PD2732U makes a compelling case for itself. It boasts 99% DCI-P3 coverage for video editing, but also 99% coverage of the Adobe RGB still image color space - few monitors can match that percentage, regardless of price.

Every PD2732U comes factory calibrated to a color accuracy of Delta E <2, and benefits from BenQ's full-panel global calibration to ensure brightness and color consistency across the entire display. The screen runs at 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution, which is plenty sharp enough for a 27-inch panel viewed from a typical distance.

Factor additional features like Thunderbolt 4 connectivity with 90W Power Delivery to an attached laptop, along with BenQ's Hotkey Puck wireless remote control dial for easier settings adjustment, and the BenQ Creative Pro PD2732U offers a lot for its $700/£650 RRP.

Specifications

Display area: 27 inches
Aspect: 16:9
Panel type: IPS
Panel bit depth: 10-bit
Display colors: 1.07 billion
Resolution: 3840 x 2160
Pixel density: 163 ppi
Refresh rate: 60Hz
Response time: 5ms
Brightness: 400 cd/m2
Contrast ratio: 1000:1
Color space coverage: 100% Rec.709, 99% AdobeRGB, 99% P3
Video inputs: HDMI x1, USB-C Thunderbolt 4 (DP Alt Mode), DisplayPort

Read more:
The best monitors for video editing
The best photo-editing monitors
The best monitor calibrators

Build & handling

The BenQ Creative Pro PD2732U is aimed at serious creatives, not flashy gamers: styling is simple but elegant, while build quality is reassuringly solid. The bezels around top and sides are only around 2mm wide (though the visible screen area starts a further 7mm within these bezels).

The monitor is supplied with a high quality stand with a weighty metal base that keeps the monitor stable and prevents vibrations reaching the screen. The stand enables 115mm of height adjustment, 90-degrees of rotation (so the screen can be changed to portrait orientation), plus a good range of tilt and swivel adjustment.

Physical connectivity is another strong aspect of the PD2732U. This isn't your average USB-C monitor with a USB 3.2 connection speed; rather the PD2732U uses Thunderbolt 4 to enable a 40Gbps single-cable connection between monitor and laptop. That means two 4K monitors can be daisy-chained to a recent/high-end MacBook, while still leaving enough remaining data bandwidth for you to use the monitor's numerous USB inputs for connecting peripherals like memory sticks or external hard drives. The latter is made possible thanks to three USB-A ports and one USB-C port positioned on the bottom of the monitor panel, each running at USB 3.2 Gen 1 speed (5 Gbps), and all offering 4.5-7.5W of charging to an attached device.

Also on the base of the panel you'll find the joystick and buttons used to control the PD2732U’s on-screen menu. Once you get used to feeling your way around the controls (they're not visible from a normal viewing position), they provide a tactile and responsive means of changing settings. BenQ's on-screen display layout is clear and easy to navigate, but if you'd prefer a more ergonomic alternative to the on-board controls, there's always the included Hotkey Puck remote control dial.

This allows you to bypass the monitor's menus for instant access to brightness, contrast, and volume settings, with the rotating dial speeding up each adjustment. The Puck also has three shortcut buttons, which as standard enable quick access to Color Mode, Input, KVM, or app launch. The shortcut buttons can be customized using BenQ's free Display Pilot 2 software, which adds even more control to monitor settings, as well as a Desktop Partition feature for easy multi-window browsing, all with a more friendly interface than the standard on-screen menus.

Performance

In its default 'User 1' color profile mode, the PD2732U produces immediately pleasing image quality with excellent contrast and color intensity. Being an IPS LCD panel, contrast consistency doesn't vary according to your viewing angle, as it would with lesser LCD panel technologies. The PD2732U's 4K resolution is also lovely and crisp on a screen this size, with the outline of individual pixels barely visible from a normal viewing distance.

Complaints? As I've found with other recent BenQ displays, the extreme left and right edges of the visible screen area appear to curve backward behind the screen bezels if you’re closer than 50cm from the panel – it isn’t distracting, but I've not encountered this with LCD monitors from other brands.

However, there’s a bigger issue, and it’s one that affects all LCD monitors. I recently reviewed my first desktop OLED monitor, and that set a new benchmark for subjective image quality. OLED screens offer a level of contrast, brightness consistency and color fidelity that even an LCD monitor as good as the PD2732U just can't match, and the difference is clear to see with the human eye. That said, PD2732U's image quality is up there with the very best LCD monitors I've reviewed, at least subjectively.

Lab results

To test BenQ's color space coverage claims, as well as precise backlight uniformity and color accuracy, we need some technological help: specifically a gadget called a colorimeter, more typically called a monitor calibrator. The Datacolor Spyder Pro is my tool of choice, so let's see whether BenQ's image quality specs for the PD2732U are as advertised.

Gamut

BenQ claims 99% AdobeRGB and 99% DCI-P3 color space coverage - I was able to pretty much match those figures in my testing.

Color accuracy

Every PD2732U is said to be pre-calibrated to an accuracy of less than Delta-E 2. In the default User 1 color profile, I recorded a Delta-E deviation from perfect color of 0.82 - an outstandingly accurate score. What's more, unlike some monitors which can return an impressive overall score, but with one color patch (usually cyan) being significantly less accurate than the other colors, the PD2732U returned great accuracy for all 24 tested colors.

Uniformity (color)

Color uniformity is pretty good across the 9 tested panel regions with brightness set to 100%, and gets even more consistent when you reduce brightness to a more comfortable 67%.

Uniformity (luminance)

Luminance (brightness) uniformity at 100% overall brightness is fairly average, with the left and right sides of the screen being around 11% dimmer than the center. However, at 100% brightness the screen is too bright to view comfortably: you'll want to drop down to 67% or lower, whereupon brightness uniformity gets significantly worse, with the dimmest region being 21% darker than the brightest area. That sounds like a poor result, but the irregularity really isn't as obvious to the naked eye as the numbers suggest - it's certainly not distracting.

The PD2732U does have a special uniformity mode that aims to improve brightness uniformity across the whole screen. With this enabled brightness uniformity goes from a disappointing 21% variation to a more acceptable 12%. There is a catch though: enabling the uniformity mode drastically reduces the monitor's maximum overall brightness, from 480 nits with the feature disabled, to just 233 nits. That wouldn't be too big a problem, as 233 nits is still bright enough for most conditions, but the uniformity mode also cuts the contrast ratio in half, to around 600:1. So not only does the screen look dimmer with uniformity mode enabled, image quality also looks much less punchy. Consequently you'll probably want to leave the uniformity mode disabled.

Brightness and contrast

The PD2732U has an advertised peak brightness of 400 nits - I recorded 480.5. And at between 1230:1 and 1500:1 (depending on panel brightness), contrast also turned out to be better than BenQ's claimed 1000:1 figure.

Verdict

BenQ has a strong history of producing high quality monitors aimed squarely at discerning content creators, and the PD2732U is a good example of the breed. Its color space coverage is superb, as is its out-of-the-box color accuracy. Brightness and contrast are also excellent. The only image quality shortcoming is brightness uniformity across the whole panel, which is relatively disappointing when measured with a colorimeter, but doesn't appear that noticeable to the eye.

The PD2732U continues to make a solid case for itself when you consider its excellent Thunderbolt 4 connectivity, strong build quality, and handy Hotkey Puck remote control dial. With a $700/£650 retail price at the time of review, it offers an awful lot for the money if you'll be using it for color-critical workloads.

However, for roughly the same price you could instead buy the stunning 27-inch ASUS ProArt Display OLED PA279CDV Professional Monitor. Though this can't match the BenQ screen for AdobeRGB color space coverage, it equals or beats it in every other image quality metric, while its OLED screen tech and incredible contrast make it look instantly more impressive to the naked eye.

Ultimately, the BenQ PD2732U is a great example of an IPS LCD monitor, but once you've seen the image quality from an OLED display, sadly even the best LCD monitor seems like a step backwards.